Meet the New Airtable: Delivering AI to the Final Mile of Enterprise Operations

Today, Airtable launches new capabilities that uplevel it to serve the most critical, large-scale digital operations in the AI era. With the launch of App Library and HyperDB, Airtable now enables today’s organizations to deploy AI into critical workflows, build customized business applications faster, and scale to meet the needs of a new era of enterprise operations.

The AI era requires a new digital operations platform

We’ve entered an entirely new age in software, marked by the emergence of generative AI. Goldman Sachs forecasts a $1 trillion investment in the coming years in AI by tech firms, corporations, and utilities – without yet clear business returns. We’re at a tipping point in the AI era, but most enterprise AI adoption is still just scratching the surface of the powerful potential that could transform digital operations. In short, few companies have moved past shallow, single-task uses and successfully deployed AI into their business to truly unlock meaningful returns.

The current approaches to enterprise AI adoption aren’t delivering. Copilots and chat tools offer individual productivity gains, but fail to automate recurring business processes. SaaS solutions have been quick to incorporate AI features, but are unable to automate the many bespoke business processes that consume most enterprises. All the while, custom app development, even through legacy low-code platforms, remains too slow and time-consuming. The result: while many companies have purchased AI tools, few have realized the much-hyped transformative benefits of generative AI.

To truly capitalize on the impact that AI has to offer, organizations need a new kind of digital operations platform – one that empowers business users to develop and deploy their own AI solutions.

Airtable is becoming the enterprise operating system for the AI era

As many media giants raced to transform into streaming companies, retailers reinvented themselves to deliver on the consumer experience and develop new business models, and financial services leaders turned to create digital experiences for both customers and clients, they turned to Airtable to power their digital operations.

In the media industry, Airtable is the platform of choice at ten of the top ten largest media companies for their content pipeline. They rely on Airtable to transform the way they operate at every step of the way – from development, filming, rights management, marketing operations, distribution, and more.

One leading streaming company in particular has transformed their content production end-to-end with custom AI solutions. With Airtable, they’ve saved 280 hours/week on genre classification as part of their programming operations; they’ve accelerated the creation of graphic assets for campaign planning; and they’ve integrated the latest LLMs into critical legal processes for talent contracts. As a result, they’ve been able to manage production more efficiently, speed up the time it takes to go to market, and deliver better content, faster, to their subscribers.

Beyond media, Airtable has become the backbone for critical processes at the largest and most disruptive companies across many verticals. From powering the marketing campaign management for F100 retailers as they execute billion-dollar campaigns across the globe, to helping airlines, banks, and software companies develop world-class software and mobile apps, Airtable powers digital operations for many of the world's largest and most recognizable brands.  

Today, we’re introducing new platform capabilities that unlock the next phase of Airtable’s enterprise offering for digital operations in the AI era.

Standardizing operations at a global scale

The largest companies often struggle with finding the right balance between standardizing global processes and meeting the unique needs of each functional business unit. Solving for standardization can create taxing administrative burdens, yet a lack of process consistency results in data silos and shadow workflows.

Airtable’s new App Library enables companies to standardize processes at a global scale, while maintaining flexibility for individual departments and teams. The App Library is a new home for custom-developed applications that can be adopted – and adapted – across an organization. Airtable administrators can now create applications to support a standard business process, embed custom AI automations, and publish the application to their company’s App Library. Business users have the ability to adopt these apps and customize them to fit their unique needs, while preserving the core business process components.

Enterprises are now able to empower their people to build valuable apps that are tailored specifically to how their teams operate and customized to how others in their organization think and work.

For example, Airtable currently drives the end-to-end digital product operations at one of the world’s largest retailers. Across 15 business units and thousands of employees, its product function needed a solution that allowed each product area to work independently, while maintaining a centralized product roadmap for reporting to senior executives. With the App Library, each team can modify their application for their specific workflow without affecting the global roadmap. By eliminating administrative work, improving cross-team dependency management, and rationalizing engineering spend, the organization is able to deliver more product and impact than ever – all while giving leadership more visibility than ever into the impact they’re driving.

App Library also empowers global companies to take full advantage of generative AI by leveraging leading AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and IBM watsonx to automate key workflows in standardized AI-powered apps. Valuable use cases of Airtable AI can be built once and re-used multiple times, enabling citizen developers to publish compelling AI solutions for use across multiple lines of business. Additionally, with Airtable’s enterprise controls, administrators can enable access to multiple models to give builders choice on the right models to leverage – or they can limit access to a single platform or model.

Airtable now operationalizes 100M+ record data sets in the enterprise

Data platforms such as Snowflake and systems of record such as Salesforce store highly valuable data sets, but often, business functions can’t easily access the data they need to operationalize it into their recurring workflows. As a result, many teams resort to using stale or incomplete data to get their jobs done.

Airtable’s new HyperDB allows enterprises to make 100M+ record data sets dramatically more accessible to business functions. Administrators can connect HyperDB to data sources such as Snowflake, Databricks and Salesforce and make them available to line of business developers for use in departmental applications. All the while, enterprise administrators maintain governance of the data and ensure compliance to industry standards to mitigate risk.

For example, if a leading digital media company has imported over two million records of movie and television titles data into HyperDB, departments across the organization are able to integrate subsets of that data into their operations. Teams managing everything from financial forecasting to product operations to marketing campaigns are able to connect to this centralized database for their own workflows to maintain access to reliable source data. With HyperDB, a massive dataset at that scale can live within the Airtable ecosystem but be managed and integrated into the specific workflows of hundreds of teams.

Delivering high-impact AI solutions to the final mile of departmental data and workflows

As the AI adoption wave continues, many companies are quickly discovering that their early investments in AI Copilots are failing to deliver real business impact. Leaders across multiple industries have discovered that providing access to a chatbot is only a small step towards AI-driven business process transformation. The value of AI will be realized through using the technology to automate workflows, rather than one-off chat interactions, so that AI can seamlessly power productivity without requiring that every person reinvent the way they work.

Airtable has become a leader in delivering high-impact AI solutions for repeating processes. For example, the AWS Marketing team developed a custom Airtable application with embedded AI to help marketers create more impactful campaigns. Each time a new campaign is generated, the application analyzes similar campaigns that performed well and generates recommendations to improve campaign performance.

Airtable enables business users – who understand the specifics of their business processes – to create high impact AI solutions through a no-code platform. Users can leverage the latest LLMs from leading platforms, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, and IBM watsonx.ai, to generate their own bespoke applications, while maintaining adherence to the enterprise’s security, privacy and governance policies.

Ushering in a new era of disruption for digital operations

At Airtable, our mission is to empower process owners who are closest to the work to build intuitive, scalable applications to run their digital operations, while also enabling central data governance and process standardization. By doing so, businesses can embrace citizen development, and those closest to the work will be more empowered to build and customize the apps most critical for their work. 

Today’s expanded capabilities usher in a new era for Airtable, establishing it as a digital operations platform that powers mission-critical workflows for the world’s most disruptive enterprises. 

App Library is available to all Enterprise Scale customers; HyperDB is currently available to select enterprise scale customers and will scale to more enterprise organizations using Airtable later this year. To learn more, visit https://www.airtable.com/enterprise.